will

Happy Birthday Lemon Pig

The

yes… ha ha ha… yes!!

𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨

𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘬𝘦𝘦𝘱𝘴 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨

panel 1: guy rushing in says "MY FAMICOM CARTS!! mouse is crushing them with a hammer. panel 2: guy, gathering cart pieces, says " how could you, these are irreplaceable." mouse says " dead world" panel 3: mouse says: artifacts of the dead world will weaken us panel 4: guy shouts " hey! " as mouse knocks over world of nintendo display kiosk. mouse says: I'm growing stronger.

bro is moving with such alacrity... I am astonished by bro

Gideon the Ninth (and the rest of the Locked Tomb series) is gay space necromancy! just a total delight to read

I've made a large update to FFX levels on noclip.website, adding particle effects, actors, and more! noclip.website#ffx/010

Kamille: "Lieutenant Quattro... You do know your mug says #1 Mom, right?"

Quattro: "Does it...?" [chuckles] "Motherhood is something I think highly of."

Kamille: [having gotten a complete non-answer] "..."

Quattro: [sees Amuro in the distance] "Continue to enjoy your youth, Kamille." [leaves]

This is the hardest I’ve laughed in a long time.

A video for absolutely nobody.

All of the Dave Ryder names from the Space Mutiny episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 except with the highest level Warrior of Light I found on the Lodestone with that name.

#FFXIV #MST3K

Microsoft Microsoft is perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal apartheid regime and ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza.

on the off-chance that my noclip post made you want to resub to WoW, let me be the first to say: my apologies

second: do remember that Blizzard is owned by Microsoft, and is a part of the BDS Movement's boycott of tech companies supporting genocide

www.bdsmovement.net/microsoft#ta...

if any of this interests you, i would highly recommend checking out the noclip.website project and its discord -- it's an incredibly helpful and knowledgable community, and if there's a game you'd love to see preserved in a way just about anyone can access, there's not much else like it.

i learned a tremendous amount about reverse engineering, 3D graphics, linear algebra, etc from this, most of which i had very little knowledge of before starting. if there's one takeaway here, it's that if you've got passion, time and persistence, you can accomplish a heck of a lot

there's more to tell about this project, but i'll leave here for now.

i'd like to give a ton of thanks to @jasperrlz.bsky.social, without whom i'd certainly never have written this project, but also for being an incredibly patient and generous mentor and co-conspirator on this project

sadly that's about all the archival footage i've got from the dev period -- at some point, whenever i ran into an issue, i'd just hop on a discord call w/ Jasper and screenshare rather than sending screenshots. here's an early version of the particle system in action, though

an early scene showing the Dark Portal in Outland. much is incorrect about this scene: the skybox is wrong, the world lighting is wrong, the green portal texture has a weird oval that shouldn't be there, and none of the particles are implemented (the braziers and statue eyes are empty)

the same scene, but from the current version of the WoW viewer. note that the skybox is now correct, the green portal looks more portal-y, and there are fires in the braziers and statue eyes

an early scene of Wyrmrest Temple. again, much is incorrect here: wrong skybox, the transparent ribbon effect at the top is wrong, and no particles

a scene of Wyrmrest Temple from the current version of the viewer: we now have the skybox's aurora and the torches have fire

once i'd rounded out most of the major graphics systems for vanilla WoW, i thought i'd try and load up some levels from the 2 subsequent expansions, Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King. to my amazement, they kinda just worked! here's some screenshots of what they looked like then vs. now

a scene from the Deeprun Tram showing the doorway to Stormwind. pink debug lines illustrate where the WMO's triangles are, with pink text denoting their position in 3D space. this was from a debug tool i wrote to visualize how Blizzard partitioned their levels into smaller chunks, allowing for efficient culling of level geometry that's not visible to the camera

a fully zoomed out view of the Deeprun Tram, so the entire tunnel and underwater scene are visible. a pink rectangular box is drawn perpendicular to the level. the box is supposed to represent the "axis-aligned bounding box", or AABB, of the level, but it's clearly rotated 90 degrees from where it should be due to an incorrect 3D transform

a zoomed out view of Warsong Gulch, with more pink boxes denoting axis-aligned bounding boxes for different WMOs in the scene. this was from one of many attempts to reduce the number of draw calls in the scene by culling more geometry.

the Forsaken base in the battleground Arathi Basin, but all of the colors look wrong. instead of rendering actual textures, this scene is using a debug shader that displays the "normal vector" (i.e. the vector pointing directly away from a surface) as a color by mapping its X, Y, and Z values to red, green, and blue. this is a very common technique to visualize normals, and is insanely helpful for tracking down when they're incorrect -- note that just based on color, you can identify which surfaces are pointing up, which are pointing towards the camera, etc

speaking of bugs, one of my favorite things about Jasper's noclip framework is the bevy of debug tools he's written into it. it's hard to overstate how useful it is to display debug information in-place when working on 3D scenes, or to use a debug shader to track down incorrect model normals

and sometimes fixing one thing breaks another

you wouldn't believe the shit i've seen while debugging my broken model animation system

a screenshot of terrain from the desert region of Tanaris, but the terrain color looks totally wrong. while some patches look ok, large portions are black & white, and there are abrupt seams where the color changes. this happened because terrains have up to 4 separate textures, which are combined differently depending on certain flags on the terrain. the problem here was i was rendering the textures as-is, rather than combining them per the flag's instructions.

a scene from the battleground Arathi Basin. but there's a problem: a building which is far away at the end of a valley is rendering in front of a tree that's right in front of the camera. this was due to me failing to set "depth write" flag which informs the graphics card which items it should draw first. as such, the graphics card was drawing the tree, and then afterwards drawing the building on top of it.

but i'd be remiss in my retelling of this story if i didn't share some of the many, many bugs and failures along the way.

an early screenshot of the WoW viewer, showing the mountains of Dun Morogh and exterior of Ironforge nestled within them. again, game lighting isn't implemented yet, so the scene looks unnaturally bright and flat

an early screenshot of the WoW viewer, showing Elwynn Forest and the exterior of Stormwind. again, game lighting isn't implemented yet, so the scene looks unnaturally bright and flat

but with these 4 ingredients (BLPs, models, ADTs, and WMOs), we can finally start rendering proper levels! well, again, not really proper due to the total lack of lighting, but at this point in the project i was seriously ecstatic just to see Ironforge nestled in its mountain here

if you're familiar with how WoW looks, you might note that the colors in the above images are pretty off. that's because at this point, i was rendering geometry and textures, but doing nothing to handle lighting. all of that came quite a bit later, so for now these scenes will look pretty flat.

An early screenshot of the WoW viewer showing the entirety of Blackrock Depths, zoomed out to a sort of "dollhouse" view. There's no game lighting, so the level looks unnaturally bright and flat

An early screenshot of the WoW viewer showing the entrance hall of Ironforge, with the bank, auction house, and lava trench visible. There's no game lighting, so the level looks unnaturally bright and flat

"but wait, if each point of terrain can only have one height value, how do caves and stuff exist??" what an astute question, hypothetical reader! and it brings us to the last major renderable object in WoW, the "world map object", or WMO. WMOs are how caves, buildings, and entire cities are stored

an early screenshot from the WoW viewer, showing a greyscale model of the terrain around the desert area Tanaris. rolling dunes give way to a steep mountain range, after which the terrain is completely flat, as the player is never meant to reach that part of the map

an early screenshot of the WoW viewer, showing a massive portion of textured terrain surrounding Blackrock Mountain. On the right side, all of Dun Morogh is shown. Below that, Loch Modan and the Badlands are visible

after models, i moved on to rendering WoW's terrain. terrain in WoW is stored in chunks called ADTs, which are fixed mesh grids that're 1024 points wide and 1024 points long. each point in the grid can have an arbitrary height value, thus giving us a sort of mesh blanket that forms the terrain

you probably noticed the models above are sideways; as it turns out, in graphics, concept of which 3D dimension is "up" is fully arbitrary, and each studio chooses their own convention. each noclip viewer has to adjust for this to get things from their "studio space" into "noclip space"

an early screenshot from the WoW viewer showing a 3D model of an Arathi farmhouse. the model is tilted 90 degrees counterclockwise

an early screenshot from the WoW viewer showing a 3D model of a throne shaped like a gravestone. the model is tilted 90 degrees counterclockwise

after textures, i moved on to models. these are pretty straightforward: they're mostly just triangle meshes which reference one or more BLPs as textures

(as an aside, all of the screenshots following this were recovered from my discord DMs w/ Jasper, so what follows is a roughly chronological account of what my viewer looked like through development)

an early screenshot of the WoW viewer, showing the texture for the Threshadon corpse in Darkshore. the image is distorted and details are arranged oddly, but this is typical for game textures since their 3D meshes specify how the image is mapped to the 3D object

an early screenshot from the WoW viewer, showing the texture of a throne shaped and styled after a gravestone. the image is distorted and details are arranged oddly, but this is typical for game textures since their 3D meshes specify how the image is mapped to the 3D object

as such, my WoW viewer needed to understand the file formats as they shipped w/ vanilla WoW. or, to be precise, as they shipped with WoW Classic. and to get things started, i began with the game's texture format, BLP

in all of the following posts, check image alt text for more dev details